Living Legends of Deception

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Using Religious Tests to Stack and Jack the Justice Department

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Jacking the Numbers

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How We Got Jacked

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Caution: Now Entering our Virtual Mythogenetic Zone

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Boom and Doom on Wall Street

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What's The Word, my good man?

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Jason Leopold at Consortiumnews.com (originally published September 3, 2008) appraises the myth of Palin the Reformer:

When John McCain trotted out Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate, his campaign and much of the U.S. news media depicted the Alaska governor as an ethics “reformer” whose meteoric political rise came from her confronting corruption within her own state Republican Party.

But a closer look at Palin's short political career reveals that she committed some of the same ethical lapses that she has attacked, especially during her unsuccessful bid for lieutenant governor in 2002. She also has shown herself to be a thin-skinned politician quick to see herself as the target of conspiracies.

In 2002, Palin – still mayor of Wasilla with a population of about 6,700 – ran much of her campaign for lieutenant governor out of Wasilla City Hall on city time, according to documents first obtained in July 2006 by an editor for Voice of the Times newspaper in Anchorage. (I obtained some of those documents from former Wasilla city officials this week.)

The documents show that Palin used city computers to manage her campaign and billed taxpayers for mailings, phone calls and literature. Palin also had her city secretary, Mary Bixby, print 75 thank-you notes to campaign donors and book a campaign related trip Ketchikan in May 2002 while on city time.

Former city officials said Palin and her campaign staff worked upwards of 10 hours a day using Wasilla City Hall as her campaign headquarters where campaign faxes were sent and received, and campaign staffers used city phones to solicit donations.

On Palin’s lieutenant governor candidate registration form with the Alaska Public Offices Commission, she used the e-mail the city gave her — sarah@ci.wasilla.ak.us — for “campaign chairperson” contact information and the Wasilla City Hall fax telephone number for "candidate information.”

Palin’s mayoral schedule for June 12, 2002 showed that she met with Herold Advertising Products in her office at City Hall. Soon after, the company faxed the city’s deputy administrator, John Cramer, "Sarah Palin Lieutenant Governor" artwork and an invoice for the work.

Former city officials said they were unaware whether Palin reimbursed the city for funds she used to promote her campaign. Neither spokesmen at the governor’s office in Alaska nor McCain-Palin campaign representatives returned telephone calls and e-mails for comment.

Building the Myth

Working at her city computer, Palin also sent three e-mails to Randy Ruedrich, the state’s Republican Party chairman, complaining about several endorsements she did not receive.

Ironically, as chairwoman of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, Palin reported Ruedrich, a fellow commissioner, to Gov. Frank Murkowski’s administration, accusing him of an ethics breach for conducting work for the state GOP on government time.

To obtain evidence of Ruedrich’s alleged malfeasance, Palin hacked into his computer, an ethical lapse in its own right. In January 2004, she resigned from the commission in protest over what she billed as corrupt practices.

Palin’s ethics complaint against Ruedrich gave her a reputation as an anti-establishment reformer at a time when the Alaskan Republican hierarchy was coming under scrutiny for corruption. Reudrich paid a $12,000 fine after an investigation revealed he had violated state ethics rules.

But in July 2006, Paul Jenkins, an editor for the conservative Voice of the Times, confronted Palin about her own apparent ethical breaches four years earlier. Her response was to insist, without explanation, that her situation was different than Reudrich's.

“I asked how her using a city computer for her campaign business was any different than Ruedrich's use of a state computer at the AOGCC to do Republican Party business,” Jenkins wrote in a column on July 7, 2006. “Not the same, she said, simply not the same.

“Then, she shifted gears and asked, ‘Is this what they've got to destroy my campaign? E-mails from 4 1/2 years ago?’ We had barely hung up — and I was wondering if there was any story in all this — when her campaign fired off a ‘news’ release headlined: ‘Palin Campaign Sees First Signs of Rumored Smear Campaign.’ Good grief. Frankly...I've never seen a politician come unhinged so quickly as Palin when asked a few straightforward questions.”

Jenkins excoriated his Alaska media colleagues for lapping up Palin’s “reformer” talking points. He said her “campaign [was] rooted in one thing: the perception that Palin somehow wears a halo and is not your average, run-of-the-mill politician.”

This editor for Voice of the Times, which bills itself as “A Conservative Voice for Alaska,” concluded with a reality check that could very well apply to the GOP talking points being used today to sell Palin to the American electorate.

“When her goody-two-shoes act starts to crumble — and going nuts because of a few obvious questions seems a first crack — folks may see her for the rank politician she is, and not necessarily a good one at that,” Jenkins wrote.

[For more on Palin’s hypocrisies, see other stories at Consortiumnews.com]

Jason Leopold has launched a new Web site, The Public Record, at www.pubrecord.org.

[Full article at Consortiumnews.com.]

Manufactured Financial "Crisis" as October Surprise?

Robert Parry at Consortiumnews.com (originally published August 29, 2008) details the many ways in which Republican dirty tricks have jacked the nation:

Over the past four decades, Republicans have dominated the outcomes of presidential races by mixing negative campaigning in public with illicit dirty tricks behind the scenes, as I've recounted in my last two books, Secrecy & Privilege and Neck Deep.

As a party, the Republicans have not only refined the art of the political smear – with such memorable moments as the Willie Horton ads in 1988 and the “swift-boating” of John Kerry in 2004 – but they also have defined the concept of the October Surprise, manipulating late-breaking events to drive the electorate toward their candidate.

Much of this Republican behavior traces back to their perceived victimization at the hands of John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson in the razor-thin 1960 race. Though many historians dispute the significance of alleged voter fraud in that election, the notion that Richard Nixon was robbed became an article of faith inside the GOP.

In 1968, Nixon and his operatives were determined that they wouldn’t get outmaneuvered again. As the race entered its final weeks, their great fear was that President Johnson would negotiate a settlement to the Vietnam War and thus push Vice President Hubert Humphrey over the top to victory.

So, although a half million American soldiers were in the battle zone and the war was tearing the United States apart, Nixon’s campaign made secret contacts with South Vietnamese leaders, allegedly offering the assurance that if they refused to cooperate with the Paris peace talks, they could expect a better deal from Nixon.

The evidence is now clear that the Nixon campaign dispatched Anna Chennault, a fiercely anti-communist Chinese-American, to carry that message to South Vietnamese president Nguyen van Thieu.

Journalist Seymour Hersh first described the initiative in his 1983 biography of Henry Kissinger, The Price of Power. Hersh reported that U.S. intelligence “agencies had caught on that Chennault was the go-between between Nixon and his people and President Thieu in Saigon. … The idea was to bring things to a stop in Paris and prevent any show of progress.”

In her own autobiography, The Education of Anna, Chennault acknowledged that she was the courier. She quoted Nixon aide John Mitchell as calling her a few days before the 1968 election and telling her: “I’m speaking on behalf of Mr. Nixon. It’s very important that our Vietnamese friends understand our Republican position and I hope you made that clear to them.”

Secret Cables

Reporter Daniel Schorr added more details in a Washington Post article on May 28, 1995, citing decoded cables that U.S. intelligence had intercepted from the South Vietnamese embassy in Washington.

On Oct. 23, 1968, Ambassador Bui Dhien cabled Saigon with the message that “many Republican friends have contacted me and encouraged me to stand firm.” On Oct. 27, he wrote, “The longer the present situation continues, the more favorable for us. … I am regularly in touch with the Nixon entourage.”

On Nov. 2, 1968, Thieu withdrew from his tentative agreement to sit down with the Viet Cong at the Paris peace talks, destroying Johnson’s last hope for a settlement and clearing the way for Nixon’s narrow victory.

Though Johnson and his top advisers knew of Nixon’s gambit, they kept it secret apparently out of concern that it could further divide the country.

Anthony Summers’s 2000 book, The Arrogance of Power, provides the fullest examination of the Nixon-Thieu gambit, including the debate within Democratic circles about what to do with the evidence.

Both Johnson and Humphrey believed the information – if released to the public – could assure Nixon’s defeat, according to Summers.

“In the end, though, Johnson’s advisers decided it was too late and too potentially damaging to U.S. interests to uncover what had been going on,” Summers wrote. “If Nixon should emerge as the victor, what would the Chennault outrage do to his viability as an incoming president? And what effect would it have on American opinion about the war?”

Summers quotes Johnson’s assistant Harry McPherson, who said, “You couldn’t surface it. The country would be in terrible trouble.”

The direct U.S. role in the Vietnam War continued for more than four years with additional American casualties of 20,763 dead and 111,230 wounded. The toll among the people of Indochina was far higher.

Johnson and Humphrey went into retirement – and to their graves – keeping silent about Nixon’s treachery.

No Political Peace

The Democratic silence about Nixon's sabotage of the Paris peace talks did not bring them political peace. Instead, it seemed to embolden Nixon.

In the years that followed, Nixon built a clandestine apparatus designed to neutralize his political enemies and ensure his reelection in 1972.

Nixon’s “plumbers unit,” employing former CIA operatives, spied on individuals who caused Nixon difficulty – the likes of Daniel Ellsberg who exposed the Pentagon Papers history of the Vietnam War – and on the Democrats, too.

In May 1972, the plumbers planted bugs in the Watergate offices of the Democratic National Committee, apparently gleaning information about the last-minute strategies of the Democratic establishment to block the nomination of Sen. George McGovern, whom Nixon viewed as the easiest Democrat to beat. [For details on what Nixon got from the bugs, see Secrecy & Privilege.]

The next month, when the plumbers returned to plant more listening devices, they were caught by Washington police, leading to the Watergate investigation. But Nixon was able to keep the story mostly under wraps until he won his landslide victory against McGovern.

In 1973, with the help of such clever operatives as Republican National Chairman George H.W. Bush, Nixon tried to fend off the mounting evidence of his guilt, but he was finally forced to resign in August 1974. His successor, Gerald Ford, then lost Election 1976 to Jimmy Carter.

Though many political observers assumed that the Watergate debacle taught the Republicans some harsh lessons, it actually convinced them that they needed a stronger media and political infrastructure so they could protect their leaders from future scandals. By the late 1970s, the modern right-wing media began to take shape.

The Republican hope for redemption came soon enough, in the 1980 race that pitted conservative Ronald Reagan and his running mate George H.W. Bush against President Carter.

The Reagan-Bush brain trust, especially campaign chief William Casey, saw the lingering crisis with Iran over 52 American hostages as a powerful vulnerability for Carter but also a potential game-changer if Carter succeeded in engineering their release shortly before the election.

October Surprise

Vice presidential candidate Bush talked publicly about the potential for Carter pulling an “October Surprise” by freeing the hostages. But the evidence is now overwhelming that the Republicans also were contacting senior Iranians behind Carter's back to make sure that Carter failed in that effort.

Over the past 28 years, more than a score of witnesses – including senior Iranian officials, top French intelligence officers, U.S. and Israeli intelligence operatives, the Russian government and even Palestine leader Yasir Arafat – have confirmed the existence of a Republican initiative to interfere with Carter’s efforts to free the hostages.

In 1996, for instance, during a meeting in Gaza, Arafat personally told former President Carter that senior Republican emissaries approached the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1980 with a request that Arafat help broker a delay in the hostage release.

“You should know that in 1980 the Republicans approached me with an arms deal if I could arrange to keep the hostages in Iran until after the elections,” Arafat told Carter. [Diplomatic History, Fall 1996]

Arafat’s spokesman Bassam Abu Sharif said the GOP gambit pursued other channels, too. In an interview with me in Tunis in 1990, Bassam indicated that Arafat learned upon reaching Iran in 1980 that the Republicans and the Iranians had made other arrangements for a delay in the hostage release.

“The offer [to Arafat] was, ‘if you block the release of hostages, then the White House would be open for the PLO’,” Bassam said. “I guess the same offer was given to others, and I believe that some accepted to do it and managed to block the release of hostages.”

In a little-noticed letter to the U.S. Congress, dated Dec. 17, 1992, former Iranian President Abolhassan Bani-Sadr said he first learned of the Republican hostage initiative in July 1980.

Bani-Sadr said a nephew of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Iran’s supreme leader, returned from a meeting with an Iranian banker, Cyrus Hashemi, who had close ties to Casey and to Casey’s business associate, John Shaheen.

Bani-Sadr said the message from the Khomeini emissary was clear: the Republicans were in league with pro-Republican elements of the CIA in an effort to undermine Carter and were demanding Iran’s help.

Bani-Sadr said the emissary “told me that if I do not accept this proposal they [the Republicans] would make the same offer to my rivals.” The emissary added that the Republicans “have enormous influence in the CIA,” Bani-Sadr wrote. “Lastly, he told me my refusal of their offer would result in my elimination.”

Bani-Sadr said he resisted the GOP scheme, but the plan was accepted by the hard-line Khomeini faction.

Though some Carter advisers suspected Republican manipulation of the hostage crisis, the Democrats again kept silent. Only after the Iran-Contra scandal broke in 1986 – and witnesses began talking about its origins – did the 1980 story get fleshed out enough to compel Congress to take a closer look in 1991-92.

Again, however the Democrats feared that the evidence could endanger the fragile political relationships in Washington that enable governing to go forward. Once more, they chose to ignore the GOP machinations and, in some cases, literally hid the evidence.

[For the most detailed account of this October Surprise evidence, see Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]

[Full article at Consortiumnews.com.]

What the Neocons Call 'Perception Management' I call Myth-Jacking

Robert Parry at Consortiumnews.com (originally published September 24, 2008) gives us a short history of Republican and neocon efforts to "manipulate the media narrative," as Scott McClellan quaintly calls it:

As the United States begins to assess how the nation got into its trillion-dollar bailout mess, a true understanding must go back three decades or so when Reagan deployed his well-honed communications skills and the Republican Right mastered the dark arts of propaganda to get the American people to shed the annoying strictures of rationality.

In the 1970s, there had been stumbling efforts by three presidents – Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter – to begin confronting stubborn structural problems, such as a growing dependence on foreign oil, environmental damage, and excessive military spending which had sapped resources away from a productive economy.

Nixon helped create the Environmental Protection Agency; he imposed energy-conservation measures; he opened the diplomatic door to communist China; and he initiated “détente” with the Soviet Union. But his presidency foundered on the rocks of his political paranoia that led to the Watergate scandal.

President Ford tried to continue many of Nixon’s policies, particularly winding down the Cold War with Moscow and slimming down the bloated Pentagon budget, which had fed what President Dwight Eisenhower dubbed the “military-industrial complex.”

However, confronting a rebellion from Reagan’s Republican Right in 1976, Ford abandoned “détente”; he let hard-line Cold Warriors (and a first wave of young intellectuals called neoconservatives) pressure the CIA’s analytical division; and he brought in a new generation of tough-minded operatives, such as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.

After winning in 1976, President Carter injected more respect for human rights into U.S. foreign policy, a move some scholars believe put an important nail in the coffin of the Soviet Union, leaving it hard-pressed to justify its repressive internal practices.

At home, Carter proposed a comprehensive energy policy and warned Americans that their growing dependence on foreign oil represented a national security threat of the first order, what he called “the moral equivalent of war.”

However, powerful vested interests managed to exploit the shortcomings of all three of these presidents to sabotage any sustained progress. For instance, Carter’s prescient energy address was widely mocked as the “MEOW speech.”

Soon, the American people were persuaded to turn away from their real-world challenges and enter a land of make-believe. Don’t worry, they were told. Be happy.

Reagan as Piper

The lead piper in this parade away from America’s tough choices was Ronald Reagan who insisted in his First Inaugural Address in 1981 that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”

As President, Reagan attacked the federal regulatory system and cut taxes so recklessly that his budget director, David Stockman, foresaw red ink “as far as the eye can see.” Reagan also justified fattening the Pentagon’s budget by citing dire warnings that the Soviet Union was on the rise (despite CIA analysis at the time that it was in sharp decline).

To marginalize dissent, Reagan and his subordinates stoked anger toward anyone who challenged the era’s feel-good optimism. Skeptics were not just honorable critics, they were un-American defeatists or – in Jeane Kirkpatrick’s memorable attack line – they would “blame America first.”

Under Reagan, a right-wing infrastructure also took shape, linking new media outlets (magazines, newspapers, books, etc.) with well-financed think tanks that churned out endless op-eds. Plus, there were attack groups that went after mainstream journalists who dared disclose information that poked holes in Reagan’s propaganda themes.

Significantly, too, Reagan credentialed a new generation of neocon intellectuals, who pioneered a concept called “perception management,” the shaping of how Americans saw, understood – and were frightened by – threats from abroad.

Many honest reporters saw their careers damaged when they resisted the lies and distortions of the Reagan administration. Likewise, U.S. intelligence analysts were purged when they refused to bend to the propaganda demands from above. [See Robert Parry’s Lost History.]

In effect, Reagan’s team created a faux reality for the American public.

[Full article at Consortiumnews.com]

Has Our Ship of State Been Beached Prior to Being Sold as Junk?

AMY GOODMAN: In a moment, we’ll be joined by one of the senators who will be voting on the legislation, the Independent senator of Vermont, Bernie Sanders। But we turn now to two other guests.... Dean Baker, let’s start with you. Explain the legislation that is being introduced.

DEAN BAKER: Well, essentially, what the President has asked for is a $700 billion blank check. He wants Congress to hand over $700 billion to Henry Paulson to use to buy, you know, bad originally mortgage-backed securities. There’s apparently an effort by the financial community to broaden that, but basically he would have a blank check to bail out Wall Street.

And let me just make one point that everyone should be very, very clear on. This was not an accident, in the sense that this is like a hurricane. This was a totally predictable event. So when President Bush or Henry Paulson say, you know, we have to come to the rescue, it is because of their incompetence, because people who understood the economy—and putting myself among those, but there are others—we were warning about this a long, long time ago. This was a totally predictable event that brought us here.

The Apprenticeship of Sarah Palin

Justin Raimondo at AntiWar.Com shows us the arc of Palin's meteoric rise:


September 15, 2008

Sarah Palin, Neocon Pod Person

Did they hypnotize her, or was that unnecessary?

The apprenticeship of Sarah Palin is an object lesson in how the neocons took over the American Right and saddled the GOP with their agenda of "big government conservatism" and perpetual war. Her brainwashing limns the experience and fate of the larger conservative movement, which has been reduced, these days, to a militaristic cult that remembers nothing of its origins – a movement of neocon pod-people.

You have to hand it to the neocons, however: Sarah Palin will far outdo Dan Quayle in her service to her handlers. And, who knows, what with McCain already well advanced in years, she may prove just as useful to them as was George W. Bush. From the neocons' perspective, she is indeed ready to become president, should the need should arise, her very inexperience being her chief qualification for the job. Here again, individual experience limns the larger picture: just as her neocon handlers delight in writing on such a blank slate as Sarah appears to be, so they imprinted their ideological prescriptions on an intellectually bankrupt conservative movement, which had long since lost touch with its traditional moorings.

~ Justin Raimondo

The human psyche is being treated as photo paper. 'Imprinting ideological prescriptions'--that's what I'm calling myth-jacking. We'd call it voodoo or witch doctor or medicine man stuff, if we weren't talking about our own beliefs. They play god with society, jack us to hell in the process of creating heaven for them alone, and then have the gall to stick us with the bill.

Palin "has the annointing"

Max Blumenthal at HuffPo reveals Palin's beliefs:

Behind the Christian right's enthusiasm for Palin's conservative credentials is a visceral sense that that she has come from them, not to them. Some right-wing evangelicals even believe she has messianic potential. As former Christian Broadcasting Network vice president Jim Bramlett wrote, "Sarah is that standard God has raised up to stop the flood. She has the anointing."

The Christian right's analysis is accurate to a certain degree. While Palin may not be The One, she is certainly one of them. Her social policy views, from her rejection of scientific evidence on global warming to her opposition to publicly funding emergency contraception for rape victims, are explicitly influenced by the sectarian theology she has subscribed to since she was a teenager. There is no better evidence of the depth of Palin's radical convictions than her startling encounter with the witch-hunter, Bishop Muthee.

Next week, [Blumenthal] will post an exclusive video documentary here that will shed further light on Palin's relationship with Muthee and the religious right in Alaska. Stay tuned.

[Full article at Huffington Post]

Take This Shock and Ring With It

Naomi Klein: “Now is the Time to Resist Wall Street’s Shock Doctrine”

While the collapse of this country’s financial system continues to send shock waves around the world, we speak to the bestselling author of “The Shock Doctrine.” Naomi Klein says the public should be wary of the Bush administration trying to use the crisis to push through more of the radical pro-corporate policies that helped cause it in the first place.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s interesting who Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is, served as an assistant to Richard Nixon’s assistant, John Ehrlichman, and moved right from there to Goldman Sachs, then became head of it when, well, the now-Senator and then-Governor Corzine left Goldman Sachs.

NAOMI KLEIN: You know, Amy, I don’t think we can stress this enough. Henry Paulson is one of the key people, the top people, responsible for creating the crisis that he is now claiming he will solve, you know, and this is—if we think about the 9/11 analogy and, you know, the state of shock that Americans were in after 9/11 and the emergence of Rudy Giuliani as the savior—and, you know, people have so much regret about that. And in the book, I write about this as the state of regression that we go into when we’re frightened. And I think Henry Paulson has really been cast in this role as an economic Rudy Giuliani, saving the day, impartial, bipartisan, a strong leader.

I found this article in BusinessWeek that ran when Paulson was appointed to the Treasury, and I just want to read you one sentence, because I think it’s all we need to know about Henry Paulson. This is from BusinessWeek, when he got the appointment as Treasury Secretary in 2006. The headline of the article is “Mr. Risk Goes to Washington.” It says, “Think of Paulson as Mr. Risk. He’s one of the key architects of a more daring Wall Street, where securities firms are taking greater and greater chances in [their] pursuit of profits. By some key measures, the securities industry is more leveraged now than it was at the height of the 1990s boom.”

Then it goes on to say that when Paulson took over Goldman Sachs in 1999, they had $20 billion in debts. When he—in these high-risk gambles. When he left, they had $100 billion, which means he took their risk level from $20 billion to $100 billion. So it is absolutely no exaggeration to say that Henry Paulson, far from speaking for Main Street, is actually bailing out his colleagues for some of the very debts that he himself accumulated. This is an extraordinary conflict of interest.

AMY GOODMAN: And then, of course, there’s the question of his own interests in Goldman Sachs today.

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, you know, allegedly, he divested from the company, so I can’t comment on that, but I think there’s some good investigation to be done.

AMY GOODMAN: Naomi Klein, I want to thank you for being with us, award-winning journalist, syndicated columnist, author of the bestselling book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.

The Bush Family Business Is Fascism

Larisa Alexandrovna at Huffington Post puts the Bush Family MO in the spotlight:

If you must break the law, do it to seize power: in all other cases observe it. ~ Julius Caesar

In 2000, the long fought for and long admired democracy of the United States of America began a slow and steady decline toward fascism - a Bush family tradition - with the installment of a president - a man the citizens overwhelmingly rejected (although the funny math told a still believed myth) - by a few corrupt judges on the US Supreme Court. That coup is now nearly complete and checkmate is all but unavoidable.

Let me first point you to the Bush administration's so-called Wall Street bailout bill, here, so that you can see for yourself that this treachery is being conducted in the light of day. Fascism is finally and formally out of the right-wing closet even if the F word is not yet openly being used (although it should be, and often).

Now, if you do not yet understand that the Wall Street crisis is a man-made disaster done through intentional deregulation and corruption, I have a bridge in Alaska to sell to you (or Sara Palin does anyway). This manufactured crisis is now to be remedied, if the fiscal fascists get their way, with the total transfer of Congressional powers (the few that still remain) to the Executive Branch and the total transfer of public funds into corporate (via government as intermediary) hands.

Adam Davidson of NPR blogs about the so-called bailout bill as follows:

I would guess that this has to be one of the biggest peacetime transfers of power from Congress to the Administration in history. (Anyone know?). Certainly one of the most concise.

The Treasury Secretary can buy broadly defined assets, on any terms he wants, he can hire anyone he wants to do it and can appoint private sector companies as financial deputies of the US government. And he can write whatever regulation he thinks are needed.

Most importantly, Davidson points to this passage in the bill:

Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.

The Bush family, in the form of Prescott Bush, has tried a more aggressive coup before in order to install fascism in this country. This treasonous plot was called "the Business Plot," because the high-level plotters - including Prescott Bush - were Wall Street men who openly supported fascism.

It seems this time around, the Bush family is trying the more subtle approach to open bloodshed: first create a crisis, then under the guise of addressing that crisis, overthrow democracy. Yes, it does sound terribly conspiracy-theory-esque when explained just this way. But what else does one call a criminal conspiracy to destroy Congressional powers permanently, alter Judicial powers permanently, and steal public funds?

As I see it now, we have but two options and I have long alluded to hoping against hope that one of these options would not be the only one left to a peaceful people. The first and frankly most preferable option is for Congress to immediately begin impeachment proceedings against the members of this latest Business Plot.

No time needs to be wasted on hearings as we already now have in writing, formally as presented to Congress, the intentions of this administration to nullify Congressional powers permanently, to alter Judicial powers permanently, and to openly steal public funds using as blackmail the total collapse of the US economy if these powers are not handed over. You do see how this is blackmail, do you not? You do see how this is a manufactured crisis precisely designed to be used as blackmail, do you not?

The other option, the one I have long prayed we would never need to even consider, is a total revolution. But, If Congress won't act in its own self-defense, in the defense of democracy, in defense of us - the people who have elected them to protect us from this very danger - then what is left for us to do? I don't want to see it come down to this, but I fear that it will. Put your party politics aside right now. We are in a crisis so dangerous that should these people succeed in their coup, your party affiliation will no longer matter, your American flag will be a nice collectible item of something that once was, and your version of God will be worshiped in secrecy because your freedoms will be owned by the few.

You are no longer Republicans, Democrats, or any shade of voter. You do not live in a swing state or a solid colored state. You are simply this: an American. That is the only side that matters. So call your members of Congress and demand, no, declare that unless they do their duty to the Constitution and to us, we will move to the streets - not because we want to, but because our founding fathers demanded this duty of each and every citizen in the face of such a domestic enemy. Demand - as is your right - that this bill be voted against and demand - as is your right - that the people plotting this treachery be held to account. We are either a nation of laws or we are no longer a democracy. Pick a side, because there won't be another time, another moment, another chance to be a patriot.

[full article at Huffington Post]

"I imagined in my mind what he must have been thinking...." --Every1 of Us (as embodied by Staff Sgt. T. J. Westphal dn2008-0610 46:15)

"The terror that I saw on the patriarch’s face, like I said, that really was the turning point for me. I imagined in my mind what he must have been thinking...."

beloved/UNION/Beloved

AMY GOODMAN: Last July, I interviewed some of the veterans whose stories appear in this book. Staff Sergeant Timothy John Westphal served in Iraq for one year. He recalled a house raid he led in 2004 on the outskirts of Tikrit.

STAFF SGT. TIMOTHY JOHN WESTPHAL: I basically just kicked the clump of people there to wake them up, turned on my flashlight, and all my guys did the same thing. And my light happened to shine right on the face of an old man in his mid-sixties. I found out later he was the patriarch of that family. And as we scanned the cluster of people laying there, we saw two younger military age men, probably in their early twenties. Everybody else—I’d say there were about eight to ten other individuals—were women and children. We come to find out this was just a family. They were sleeping outside.

The terror that I saw on the patriarch’s face, like I said, that really was the turning point for me. I imagined in my mind what he must have been thinking, understanding that he had lived under Saddam’s brutal regime for many years, worried about—you know, hearing stories about Iraqis being carried away in the middle of the night by the Iraqi secret service and so forth, to see all those lights, all those soldiers with guns, all the uniform things that we wear, as far as the helmet, the night vision goggles, very intimidating, very terrifying for the man. He screamed a very guttural cry that I can still hear it every day. You know, it was just the most awful, horrible sound I’ve ever heard in my life. He was so terrified and so afraid for his family. And I thought of my family at that time, and I thought to myself, boy, if I was the patriarch of a family, if soldiers came from another country, came in and did this to my family, I would be an insurgent, too.

Why Are We So Effed in the Head? We've Been Weaponizing Psyche since the Sixties

Why is society as we know it on the Brink? Well, both here in America and in the labs of our Cold War opponents, we've been weaponizing Psyche since the Sixties, the direct product of machining our own minds, reducing us all to cogs in the Great Cosmic Machine, for centuries now--that's our fundamental, climate-changing problem. "Nature as machine" is the idea that's killing us, making a Frankenstein's monster of our own Mother. Our pointilistic, mechanistic, reductionistic assumptions about the essence of Being are the problem. Last winter, I went mad with the realization that my psychological colleagues, among others, have been weaponizing Psyche.

Worse, I think it is being used deliberately in myth-jacking whole nations to hell, including Us, and I think it traces directly back to lectures by Joseph Campbell at the Foreign Services Institute, beginning in 1957. I'm now certain that even mythology has been weaponized.

Once we dissociate our selves from their very source, our shadows become our foes; this is the lesson of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad as related by that same Joseph Campbell. We then reduce the universe to a machine, and install our war gods permanently at the controls. The whole cosmos is our battlefield to dominate, that's our official policy ("Full Spectrum Dominance" by name).

And that's what this is about: dominance. It's not about the oil. It''s about our access to energy as a measure of our god's blessing. The uncounted multitudes we kill in the process are heaped on our god's altar; the stench is perfume to the noses of many Democrats and Republicans, Zionists and bin Ladenites, alike; the very din of Hell on Earth is music to their ears.

To the lunatic Crusaders still running our show, it's all about dominance: the power to compel tribute or service.

Are we beings, or machines? Have you ever looked up into the night sky, and felt your share of Psyche collapse into a psychic black hole? Well, turn the view around! Basing our concept of the self inside just such a quantum singularity implodes our minds into CELLVES of our own making, from within which we then wage war on all else. This is the psychology of feudalism, not democracy.

And, if true, these are some of the walking wounded: survivors of real-life experiments in psychotropic chemical warfare, as reported by Jeff Stein in CQ (which I found on Ken Silverstein's blog, Washington Babylon); read the whole article.

This was sometime in the very early ’60s, supposedly, a brief period between the end of U-2 overflights and the deployment of spy-in-the-sky satellites.

My friend said his patients described training with drugs and other mind-control techniques to perform the mission — then forget them, like the Manchurian Candidate.

But now they were remembering fragments, they told him, giving them terrifying nightmares about things they could not quite believe they had done.

They thought they were losing their minds. So did any loved ones who they dared tell their looney-sounding tunes to.

But this being America, of course, they — and other self-described victims of CIA mind control experiments — formed self-help groups. And for several years, it turns out, they have been holding yearly conferences, like one just outside Hartford, Conn., next month.

“About a hundred” people usually show up, says Neil Brick , coordinator of “The Eleventh Annual Ritual Abuse, Secretive Organizations and Mind Control Conference.”

Right On, Cusanus!

Obama's Cosmic Answer to Graham's Feudal Inquisition

Read it all here

On his blog, No Comment, Scott Horton tells us that Senator Obama's recent eloquent response to an Evangelical inquisition by Francis Graham, son of Billy, brings forward Cusanus's response, 555 years ago this May, to the devastating invasion and occupation of his holy city, Constantinople, in the religious war that occupies us today.

Humankind can achieve one true religion with diverse rituals (una religio in rituum diversitate), Cusanus writes.

What Cusanus therefore proposes is tolerance. However, it is not the insulting sort of tolerance, which proposes official indifference. Rather it is a tolerance that has its roots in a philosophical commitment to the search for truth and a recognition that human frailties and imperfections will always lead to mistakes. “For it is a condition of the earthly human estate to mistake for truth that which is merely long-adhered-to custom, indeed, even to mistake this for a part of nature,” Cusanus writes (habet autem hoc humana terrena condicio quod longa consuetudo, quæ in naturam transisse accipitur, pro veritate defenditur.)

But how to reconcile faiths so disparate? For Muslims, polygamy is an accepted practice; for Christians, it is a crime. Christians embrace the notion of a trinity, which Jews and Muslims deride as a vestige of a primitive polytheistic past. For Muslims, paradise is unfolded as a place for carnal pleasures with dark-skinned maidens granted to soldiers who have died in battle, a prospect he says would be unappealing to the sober Christian who aspires to leave behind the life of the flesh. Cusanus gives the answer through the Apostle Paul: man achieves salvation on the basis of faith, not works; these faiths are united in the tradition of Abraham, and their common grounding provides a basis to surmount their differences. The just spirit will achieve eternal life (anima justi hæreditabit vitam æternam). He also adopts an anthropological perspective with regards to customs and rites. They are instituted for important purposes, perhaps, but their ultimate spiritual significance can well be doubted, and their importance can become outlived. Thus a diversity of rites presents no obstacle to the recognition of a common fundamentally shared religion, particularly among the Abrahamic faiths.

Surely, however, the author, a prince of the Roman Catholic church and arguably the greatest theologian it produced in his era, does not distance himself from the sacraments and their importance, and advocates Jesus Christ as a personal intermediator and savior. But with equal clarity, he has answered Rev. Graham’s question to Barack Obama, and the answer he gives is identical to the one that Obama gave Graham (”Jesus is the only way for me. I’m not in a position to judge other people.”)

beloved/UNION/Beloved
O sister my Sister!
O brother my Brother!
O mother my Mother!

There is no absolute Other, only relatively Beloved

So I asked (via e-mail) Prof. Horton if Cusanus was indeed the source.

A Renaissance Painter's View Out the Big Window

[Image source: http://www.harpers.org/media/image/blogs/misc/van-eyck-chancellor-rolin.jpg]

You'll have to visit No Comment for the actual Cusanus quote. Notice the shift in focus expressed by the placement of the figures . It's a Renaissance image corresponding to our new self-portrait, our tilted heliosphere, that I posted last month.



Scott Horton writes:

At the core of the values of the early Renaissance was the notion of the human individual and the cosmos; these ideas are generally tied to the great humanists of the Quattrocento such as Petrarch or Pico della Mirandola. But Ernst Cassirer and Erwin Panofsky saw the same concepts expressed in the paintings of Jan van Eyck and his contemporary, the theologian and philosopher Nicholas of Kues or Cusanus, and both specifically cite the masterpiece The Madonna of Chancellor Rolin as a prime example. In Die Kunst der Künste (1999), Anita Albus has provided a detailed development of the Cassirer-Panofsky thesis, drawing on this passage from Cusanus and carefully reviewing the construction of the van Eyck masterpiece. “The wounding recognition that the earth was not the center of the universe was compensated for by the enhanced status of the individual,” Albus writes in her discussion of van Eyck, quoting Cusanus. “The equivalence of every point of view corresponds to the continuum of space.” The American art historian Clifton Olds has made similar arguments.

"That's a shift in frame." --Every1 of Us (as embodied by Francis Moore Lappé dn2008-0709)

AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to the food crisis. Shortly after saying they were “deeply concerned” about soaring global food prices and supply shortages, world leaders attending the G8 summit in Hokkaido sat down to an eighteen-course gastronomic extravaganza, courtesy of the Japanese government. The dinner was themed “Blessings of the Earth and the Sea,” and the global food shortage was certainly not evident. The meal included delicacies such as caviar, milk-fed lamb, sea urchin, winter lily bulbs, truffles and tuna, with champagne and wines flown in from Europe and the United States.

The extravagance of the menu drew disapproval from critics. The charity Save the Children said, “It is deeply hypocritical that they should be lavishing course after course on world leaders when there is a food crisis and millions cannot afford a decent meal.”

A preliminary World Bank study released last week estimated up to 105 million people could drop below the poverty line due to rising food prices, including 30 million in Africa. Grain prices have more than doubled since January 2006, with 60 percent of the rise occurring this year. More than thirty countries have experienced rioting over food shortages. Overall, the world’s poorest countries like Bangladesh, Ethiopia and Haiti, which import most of their food, stand to suffer the most.

Frances Moore Lappé is the co-founder of the Institute for Food and Development Policy, the Center for Living Democracy, as well as the Small Planet Institute. She is the author or coauthor of sixteen books. Her 1971 bestseller, Diet for a Small Planet, sold more than three million copies. Her latest book is called Getting a Grip: Clarity, Creativity & Courage in a World Gone Mad.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Frances Moore Lappé.

FRANCES MOORE LAPPÉ: Thank you, thank you, thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: The eighteen-course meal, your comments?

FRANCES MOORE LAPPÉ: Unbelievable. I mean, maybe too believable, but especially after Gordon Brown was preaching to his British citizens to be more careful about food waste as the solution to a growing food crisis. But I just want to start out saying, Amy, that this is perhaps the biggest human rights debacle, human rights crisis, of my entire lifetime. And now that I’m sixty-four, that’s getting to be able to say something, you know? And it is totally avoidable.

AMY GOODMAN: How?

FRANCES MOORE LAPPÉ: Well, first of all, let me just start out that human beings, we’re a pretty bright species, and feeding oneself and our offspring is what every species does. And we evolved sharing food, where if there was food, everybody ate. And so, the only way that I can understand this crisis is that ideas, ideology, has more power than instincts, and we have been trapped increasingly into an ideology that says that there’s only one rule that governs an economy—that is, highest return to existing wealth, people, you know, who already have the shares.

So we end up preaching free market as if that were a magic cure, and I call it faith-based economics, because actually what we have been locked into and what is underneath this crisis is that we accept a power-centralizing, power-concentrating economy, which means that no matter how much is produced—I mean, there is no food shortage. I just want to really underscore that. Food production has been keeping ahead of the numbers of people on our earth. There’s no food shortage. We are creating scarcity out of plenty because of this power-concentrating model that we’ve—this idea that is more powerful than our food-sharing instinct that we evolved in.

AMY GOODMAN: You did a piece in the Huffington Post called “Just Who’s Doing the Hoarding? Food Independence and Real Democracy.” What do you mean by “food independence”?

FRANCES MOORE LAPPÉ: Well, one often hears about oil independence. And the idea that if one’s very survival is dependent on something you have no control over, in this case the diversion of good land to grow fuel, agrofuel, or other changes that you have no control over, then are you really a free people? Do you have any food security? In this case, the core question. Maybe more important than oil independence is food independence. And yet, you know, from the beginning of my work on hunger, way back in the ’70s, in our book Food First I wrote with Joseph Collins, we made this point that in a world where clearly power is concentrating, if you can’t grow food to feed yourself, then you are highly insecure.

So, all of the policies, however, of the last several decades that international agencies have been pursuing, in some ways coercively, by making their aid dependent on this kind of policy of—what I’m suggesting here, that third world countries have been encouraged to grow whatever will bring the highest price in the global market and then import food when needed. And they are, therefore, set up for this disaster, where we see a skyrocketing of food prices. And so, the imports then become unattainable, and they are on the edge of hunger or starvation.

So it’s—I’m saying that when we talk about oil independence, we should also be thinking about food independence. And this is the theme of the term “food sovereignty,” which is now being pursued by an international coalition, Via Campesina, which is the small farmers of the world uniting.

AMY GOODMAN: And what do you think has to happen right now?

FRANCES MOORE LAPPÉ: Well, first, the core is for the people of the planet to wake up and recognize that this is a huge human rights crisis. There’s an estimate that the number of people could double, who are either hungry or at the edge of hunger, to encompass a quarter of the world’s people. So it’s an awakening. There is no food shortage, so that just growing more food will not solve the problem. And to challenge their governments to say, yes, growing more food is—can be very important in Africa, where, you know, much of the G8, you know, talking about how can we increase food production, but let’s wake up from this myth that production alone can solve the problem, because 80 percent of the people in the world today are living in societies where inequalities are increasing, so no matter how much is produced, they can’t buy the food they need.

So, here in our country, clearly, what to do is to elect a new government, but not think that that’s enough, continue to pursue the idea that the market can only work when it is subsumed, when it is part of a democratic polity that is setting the standards around it, so that we won’t do things like shift good land into agrofuel. The head of the Food and Agricultural Organization said that 100 million tons of food have now been diverted. And clearly, no assemblage of regular citizens would say, “Oh, yeah. You know, 18 million children are dying a year of hunger. Let’s shift food into agrofuel.” No, no, no. So we have to reclaim democracy, in a word.

AMY GOODMAN: Very briefly, Frances Moore Lappé, you have your ideas that you lay out in Getting a Grip to help us probe deeply, identify causal forces, choose entry points and shift patterns—ten—or rather, eight ideas perhaps to save the world, beginning with thin democracy versus living democracy.

FRANCES MOORE LAPPÉ: Well, this is what I’m talking about, Amy, that this notion that democracy is simply a certain kind of market, highest return to existing wealth, plus elected government. That is thin. That is frail. It will never get us there. And so, all of my writing, all of my thinking, for the last several decades has been to identify the emergence of what I call “living democracy.”

You asked a few moments ago what to do. Well, we have models throughout the world where people are ending hunger. Think of the largest social movement perhaps in our hemisphere, the landless workers in Brazil. They have made huge strides against hunger, because they have democratized control over the land. They have resettled a third of a million families. They have created new enterprises and new farms and new communities. And they are drastically reducing hunger. So that is living democracy, people actually realizing that democracy is not just about what we have, what’s done to us or for us, but what we do. So that’s number one. That’s a shift in frame. And I see it throughout the world, but most people can’t see it yet, because it’s still not in the mainstream media.

AMY GOODMAN: And finally, talking about living democracy’s checklist.

FRANCES MOORE LAPPÉ: Well, this is a shift of frame from things, like grow more food, have more seeds, to the shift to empowerment. This is the fundamental shift, Amy. This is—you know, so much of the world hunger debate is still trapped in the thing: you know, people need more things, more food, more roads. What people need is more power.

So, in the checklist at the end of my book, there’s a chapter called "Sanity in Motion,” and it’s asking all of us to begin to think, how do our actions begin to shift power, so that, for example, where is hunger eliminated, not where people become dependent on things that they have to purchase, like imported fertilizers or chemical pesticides, but where they are empowered to grow healthy food with their own resources and know how to do that. So, a study of fifty-seven countries with about 13 million farmers have shown 50 to 100 percent increase in yields where farmers are using local resources, organic, sustainable methods. So this is the shift from things that make one dependent to the empowerment of ourselves and community.

And so, I have a checklist that asks, you know, are we creating that shift in power? Are we making it sustainable so that people want to remain engaged and so that we are constantly mentoring and bringing new people in to understand that the earth is abundant? It’s a question of how do we together create communities to align with the earth’s natural abundance.

AMY GOODMAN: Frances Moore Lappé, I want to thank you for being with us. Her latest book is called Getting a Grip: Clarity, Creativity & Courage in a World Gone Mad.

From [Absolute Supremacy / The Common Weal, Heaven On Earth ///[[[{Absolute Subjugation}]]]]

to a more perfect Union:

beloved/UNION/Beloved

There is no absolute Other! only relatively Beloved.

Hell on Earth for the Many, Heaven for Just The Right People

Rapture Ready: The Unauthorized Christians United for Israel Tour from huffpost on Vimeo.

Bravo Max Blumenthal! All of this nonsense depends on the assumption of a self or soul apart from its own source. Hell on Earth is OK with most people, as long as they are promised to be in the Heaven for the Few.

We also believe that we are the masters of the Great Cosmic Machine: constrained by mathematics and physics but answerable to NO1. In the manner recommended by Hermann Goering, our leaders conflate themselves with NO1, portraying themselves as the only true agents of the Master of the Universe. To oppose the US and Israel, then, is to oppose both God and the natural laws he pronounces. The Other Party is believed to be the agents of the E-vil One. So it's not just OK to make war on your neighbors of differing opinions and beliefs, it's your sacred duty. You're with us, or against us, remember?

For Christian Imperialists, language and science are instruments of this machine, and the Machine is an instrument of God's will as they see it, which of course is indistinguishable from their interests, seeing as how we humans project ourselves outward in creating gods to begin with. Our gods are our selves writ large.

So Karl Rove, for example, has not done what he's done "for pure politics," as Paul Alexander said in his interview with Scott Horton. He's a Holy Warrior in God's Own Holy War, advancing the Day of Reckoning when all us Others will be cast into Hell, as if Rovian Republicans hadn't done that already, and the Chosen Very Very Very Few will ascend to Heaven.

Rove isn't as outrageous as Hagee, but both believe in the same basic timeline: sooner or later, all our enemies will be wiped out and we'll enjoy heaven without them forever. The same cosmogenic mythos inspires Bushites and bin Ladenites alike.

[Absolute Supremacy / THE COMMON WEAL, HEAVEN ON EARTH///[[[Absolute Subjugation]]]

The slashes and brackets represent all the Walls of Denial, all the shields and armour and callouses and defenses, that we hide behind, esp. those we hide behind from within. Substitute any Dominant-Submissive pair you like.

Compare that with the kernel of a more perfect Union:

belovedUNION/Beloved